The Peer-Reviewed EmDrive Paper Is Officially Out

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It
is now official, the propellantless engine known as EmDrive seems to actually
work. A few months ago, it was announced that a peer-reviewed
paper on the EmDrive was accepted for publication in the Journal of
Propulsion and Power, and it is now available for anyone to read on the Internet.

The paper is
authored by Harold White and six other engineers and scientists from NASA's
Eagleworks Laboratory. It shows that the EmDrive produces 1.2
millinewtons per kilowatt of power supplied.

"Thrust
data from forward, reverse, and null suggests that the system is consistently
performing with a thrust to power ratio of 1.2 ± 0.1 millinewtons per
kilowatt," the team wrote in the paper's abstract. In the paper, the team
detailed how they carefully tried to account for many potential sources of
error, and they have shown that the EmDrive does indeed work.

"The
test campaign included a null thrust test effort to identify any mundane
sources of impulsive thrust; however, none were identified," they
added.

The
thrust value might seem small at first, even compared to low-thrust spacecraft
like NASA's Dawn, which has a thrust-to-power ratio of about 60 millinewtons
per kilowatt. However, the EmDrive has an advantage: It doesn’t require a
propellant and that’s the controversial property of the EmDrive. It appears to
be producing a reaction without the need for an action, violating Newton’s
third law of dynamics. The engine is a conical copper container that generates
thrust when filled with microwaves.

It
is still not clear where the propulsion comes from, though the researchers
believe that the force is the measurable reaction to the oscillating
microwave photons in a quantum vacuum field. Their explanation requires an
uncommon and hardly accepted interpretation of quantum mechanics, known as the
realist interpretation. This view states that the probabilistic measurements we
obtain from quantum mechanics is due to the combination of a real particle
that has a perfectly determined path and velocity and a “pilot wave”
that generates the probabilities we observe.

These
ideas have been discussed since the inception of quantum mechanics, and even
Einstein claimed that there must be some "hidden variables" inside quantum
mechanics. The hidden variable theory was shown to be less likely than one
chance in 170 million.

Another paper,
published in June, suggests that the cause for the thrust has to do with the
shape of the cavity and the energy of the photons. The researchers,
who are unaffiliated with the EmDrive team, suggest that photons interact
with themselves in a destructive way and that the conical structure
creates an imbalance of photons on one side, thus producing thrust. More
experiments will be necessary to confirm the findings, but this could
revolutionize interplanetary space travel.